127. To Be Or Not To Be A Christian...

That is a question that would never have been asked a century or two ago, at least not in Europe, because they all were Christians of sorts.

But today that is a different matter. There is a wide, huge difference in being a Christian or not.

For one thing if you are not a Christian, you have much more fun. You can go out and piss your tiny brain out with alcohol and make it even tinier with drugs. You can kick and knock down old folks with their walking sticks and rip off their pension. You can park off your kids in front of the telly with a packet of chips and a fizzy drink while you have it off with the plumber in the cellar below. There are such a variety of things that are not forbidden by a religion who doesn’t have God looking down on them and allows you to indulge in all such delights which supposedly is a claim to freedom.

My above use of “God looking down on people” is quite an unhappy phrase- because God does not look up down or across, he is part of us, he is this humanity itself, He became so as a baby in Bethlehem 2000 years ago.

No one says you, personally, have to believe that, you’re welcome to look the other way, as far as I’m concerned, and if you’re happy with the alternative, provided it causes no harm to self, creatures, man or earth, you are welcome to it. The problem is that in most cases, the alternative does not safeguard the individual from harming self, creatures, man and earth.

I’m not saying that there are no Christians who do not commit harm to themselves, creatures, man and earth, but such people know that there is a thing called forgiveness, that there is someone to take them back, another chance and opportunity to heal whatever wounds they have slashed is always open to them. This is the difference to be or not to be a Christian.

Technically speaking to be a Christian you need to be baptized. More than seventeen hundred years ago one was baptised as an adult who took a three year course in learning the scriptures, behaving well and be sponsored by someone who would vouchsafe for the person’s good character. Then the question cropped up; what if one died before, where would they end up? As if God would bar entry to the abode that He has prepared for those desiring it! So it was that babies were baptized even that very same day of birth.

One may say, but what the dickens does some water, blessed or not poured over a head do? Some of these Christian rituals seem almost like procedures of superstition? Apart from the fact that Christians call them Sacraments and not rituals, if performed without the intervention of God, they are quite, empty, meaningless and useless. You can’t really think that when Richard Chamberlain in Thorn Birds was ordained Cardinal, that the actor actually became one, just as no one questions that Pope Benedict is in effect a consecrated Pope. The difference is in “acting” and “being”, and to be a Christian means that one has received the GRACE of Baptism, which by no means comes just from human hands.

And as this Sunday we celebrate the Baptism of Christ, by John, again, Jesus did so to show that he was human, we also renew our baptismal vows made for us by our parents and God-parents... one of these is do you renounce the Devil? In other words all  exciting things that if you don’t do them makes you seem a dude, but are mere snares and seductions that the above named would like to entice you into so as to end up thoroughly miserable, with life, people, the world and most of all yourself.

Photos illustrate a community baptism in our village church